Nothing too deep in this post, mostly some thoughts on the recent crackdowns in Britain against speech.
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Category: Philosophy
Just some thoughts about liberty messaging. It’s widely available and usually free. You can find pro-liberty commenters across the whole spectrum, from hardcore anarchists to relatively soft and cuddly pro-freedom voices.
Yet less than one person in a hundred actually is convinced.
Why?
I was inspired by part of a Lew Rockwell speech that was posted at the Mises Institute website last week!
Today, I’m talking about the dangers of positivism in economics. Basically, in complex systems like the economy, you need a logical, causal framework to evaluate ideas. A purely positivist (i.e., each idea must be tested empirically) approach can be disastrous.
Why? Because empirical testing of uncontrolled systems can lead to counterintuitive and non-generalizable results!
The temptation to fiddle endlessly becomes a source of wealth for the fiddler and a source of poverty for everybody else.
Not only are there unlimited legions of bad ideas to “test,” there are an equally unlimited number of statistical tests to apply to the subsequent data, and a finite confidence interval means some of those statistical tests will give you false positives!
Anyway, check out the video up top, and the show notes here.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of consent from a political perspective. It’s easy to simply call every bit of the state evil and coercive, but it doesn’t seem to convince a lot of people.
So, the thing I’m trying to understand is, what does the average person–not a hardcore anarchist–think of when they envision political consent? Where is the line between a voluntary government and a coercive state? Where is the line between dissidence and withdrawal of consent?
In the video above, I consider a few examples that I’ve seen in popular culture as well as a few of my own devising and try to reach some conclusions.
See my notes for this video here.
I’ve been having a lot of fun lately thinking about the boundaries between a coercive state and a voluntary government. A recent article by Wanjiru Njoya over at the Mises Institute threw me into a bit of a rabbit hole and I thought I’d set down some of my thoughts in a video.
Technology is a lot like policy: the good analyst looks at the short and long term issues and the primary and secondary and less obvious effects.
I recently heard someone blurt out that hydrogen is the solution to our energy problems on a libertarian-tangent show, and it was bugging me, so a bit of a rant.
I saw this post today and I feel like I had a bit of an epiphany.
As silly as it might sound, I’ve been trying to put up reasonably original stuff, without repeating myself too much. Kind of a “dissertation” attitude toward posts.
Honestly, it’s caused me more often than not, to tell myself it’s not worth saying something that’s been said before.
Categories
Rothbard: 1, Fuzzy Language: 0
I’ve just started reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and I found a lovely example of how fuzzy language obscures what the state is and how it differs from “society.”
Audio/video version of my recent article over at the Tenth Amendment Center!
Also available at Bitchute!
My latest over at the Tenth Amendment Center! Today I’m debunking the idea of a right to “freedom from fear,” which has been widely used to justify mass civilian disarmament.
Turns out, #1) That’s not even what FDR was *!&^ing talking about, and #2) We’d have to give up a huge number of valuable common-law and Constitutional protections to enforce such a right!
Worth it? I think not.
I might–nah, should–do a video version of this, because I thought some parts are pretty fire. We’ll see.